Sig Christenson: Why Ramazan Bashardost matters

A regular commentator on our online stories didn’t think much of the profile we did on Dr. Ramazan Bashardost, a member of Parliament who placed third last year in Afghanistan’s contested presidential election.

Pontifikate, as he styles himself, wrote, “Hey Sig, thanks for reporting from Kabul, but these political stories are alot of ka’bull. It’s not like anyone in SA is going to vote for any of these guys. I keep asking myself, what would I want a local ‘on-the-scene’ reporter to tell me about Afghan(istan)? Hard to think of anything.”

Like everyone, our constant online reader would like to know how this war, already in its ninth year, is going to play out in say 2013 or 2015. Like a lot of people, he strikes me as being very skeptical of this conflict and how it is going to end.

Fair enough. But for more on how the war turns out, call the Amazing Kreskin.

No story anyone here writes is going to get us closer to an answer. Even generals I have talked with won’t hazard a guess about when the Afghan security forces are ready for prime time. They’ll echo Gen. Stanley McChrystal in saying, yes, we’re going to win.

But when we’ll win? Well, that’s another matter.

So we’ve done the next-best thing. Photographer Edward Ornelas and I have tried to get a sense of things by embedding with the Texas Army National Guard in Ghazni, where soldiers with the unit — a good number of them from San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley — help Afghans develop 21st-century farming and ranching methods.

Along the way, we spent time with our troops in the Bagram Air Field hospital and wrote about Dr. John Kennedy Bini, the “trauma czar” there from the Alamo City. We ran into an Air Force captain also from our town, Matt Howard, who married a New Braunfels woman he has never met in person. They did it New Year’s Eve on Skype, a free online videoconferencing system and, if I might add, a marvel of telecommunications.

We’ve interviewed many soldiers and airmen, including top U.S. and NATO commanders here, for stories that will be filed after Ed and I come home. Some of those will amaze and delight, and fill you with patriotic pride, A couple of them are pretty serious slice-of-life stories that will give you a better idea of just how poor and broken a country this is.

Oh, and we’ve spent a lot of time on the streets of Kabul talking with the low and high alike, writing about how people live here, what they think of the war, their government, our presence and the surge. Through all of our work, we have tried to personalize the story of this war, finding stories that either are compelling or have a strong local flavor.

That brings us to Bashardost and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, who we interviewed on separate occasions and did stories on. Both men took President Hamid Karzai, the incumbent, into a runoff. Abdullah dropped out before the election, but he remains a formidable player in Afghan politics and may well be the nation’s next president. As to Bashardost, he is an oddball backbencher in the mold of the young Newt Gingrich.

Back In the day, I didn’t ever think of Gingrich as a national political figure, a man who might someday be speaker of the House or a possible presidential candidate. He threw a lot of bombs, just as Bashardost does, and often was dismissed for doing it.

Still, every person we met on the street liked Bashardost, a firebrand lawmaker that influential politicians like Fawzia Koofi, perhaps the nation’s most high-profile MP, dismiss with a laugh. But Abdullah readily concedes to having underestimated Bashardost, one of just three presidential candidates to get more than 10 percent of the nationwide vote, and gives him high marks for displaying unexpected leadership.

Curiously, most of the people who say they like Bashardost admit they didn’t vote for him, the reason being that he either wasn’t from their tribe or they figured there was no way on earth he could take down Karzai and Abdullah, a mighty political figure with a colorful mujahadeen pedigree and years in office here as the foreign minister.

Like H. Ross Perot, Bashardost is quixotic, maybe even a little on the crazy side. He bills himself as the only candidate fearless enough to tell the truth to those controlling a very crooked country. In challenging Karzai and staying in government even after a relatively poor showing in the presidential election, Bashardost is telling anyone willing to listen that he is the only chance for honest government and a peaceful resolution of the war.

While Bashardost said that he was wrong in thinking the time was right last year for Afghans to put their country’s future ahead of tribal loyalty, there’s always tomorrow.

The simple act of pressing on is his way of projecting optimism.

The reason we followed Bashardost for a couple of days around town is simple: he and a handful of other influential political figures in this country are the true future of Afghanistan. How well they do in grappling with the countless problems facing their countrymen, right down to their right to survive as a democratic state and push back the obvious dangers of a resurgent Taliban, ultimately will settle the issue of when our troops, and others from dozens of other NATO nations, leave here and come home.